When was the last time an audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more accurate reflection of its finished movie, has been winning cheers and laughs for demolishing the White House -- with satire. In this film's twisted game plan, presidential aides concoct an election-eve straight-to-video war with Albania hoping to torpedo charges that their boss improperly touched a teenage girl. The preview audience instantly sees the logic of Hollywood and Washington working together to create that greatest of political diversions: an international crisis. And the movie is even better than the trailer. It's a scintillating political lampoon, as ticklishly precise as Robert Altman's HBO miniseries Tanner '88. Director Barry Levinson has given this swift, sure-footed film a matter-of-fact, improvisational look and feel. To appreciate its brisk, confident, wild comedy, all you need is a funny bone and a B.S. meter. It should appeal equally to voters who always end up feeling hoodwinked and to the slackers and protesters who don't vote.
Levinson's best movie since Diner has a premise in some ways as old as the 1978 thriller Capricorn One, in which a manned flight to Mars turned out to be staged. Here the event that's faked is a war, but the process that's being dummied up is American democracy, and the victim is the American community. Yet the movie doesn't become a heavy-handed, moralistic fable; it's a waggish tale, not a finger-wagging horror. Levinson takes viewers so far inside his satiric vision of a Beltway-to-Bel Air image-making corps that it's hard not to get caught up in the team spirit. The movie says that this is the only genuine spirit left in America -- and it threatens to leave actual corpses in its wake.
After a Camp Fire Girl-like teen blows the whistle on the president's Oval Office misconduct, D.C. spin doctor Connie Brean (Robert De Niro) decides that the chief executive needs to galvanize support for a Gulf War-ish conflict in tiny, mysterious Albania, which is suitably "shifty, standoffish." (And speaking of mystery, we see only the president's back, never his face.) Brean knows that what Americans recall from past wars are images, slogans, merchandising; his plan is to deliver this stuff on the airwaves. That's where Dustin Hoffman comes in. Brean and presidential aide Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) enlist legendary Hollywood producer Motss (the t is usually silent), played by Hoffman, to craft a scenario of terrorism in Albania and a suitcase bomb coming in through Canada to gear the country up for war.
What's original about the movie's take on the spin doctor is that he isn't a James Carville or a Lee Atwater. Brean scarcely projects any personality, much less a colorful one, and he won't take credit for his successes -- he just wants to do his job and disappear. He's the political functionary for an age in which no one plays the posterity game -- everybody realizes that the country's attention span has shrunk to minutes and the memory bank is depleted too. All he cares about is results; all he cherishes is his professional reputation.
If Seinfeld is the comedian of nothing, Brean is nothing's kingpin. In the movie's early going, when he advises the president's men (and women) to plant questions about Albania in the press and then "deny, deny, deny," he could be counseling Bush on Irangate or James Cameron on the troubles of Titanic. But there's one huge difference: Brean urges his clients to deny a controversy that doesn't exist, and then, once it's been fabricated, 'fess up to it.
De Niro turns in his canniest performance since his sizzling cameo a dozen years ago in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. He transforms Brean's combination of observance and recession into a treasure trove of comic surprises, as well as a font of evil wisdom. At one point a CIA agent (William H. Macy) figures out the scam -- "Two things I know to be true: There's no difference between good flan and bad flan, and there is no war." Macy does one of his deadpan specialty numbers as the self-righteous spook; in one terse scene he electrifies the character, giving him the lightning certainty of a human lie detector. But when he faces Brean, the poor guy doesn't know what he's up against. De Niro's understated knowingness envelops all the people around his character like a hilarious existential blob, whether they're from the CIA or the motion picture academy. While Motss, the Mr. Fix-it of the back lot, responds to snafus with the high-pitched snarl "This a walk in the park," Brean sits back and assumes a browsing position. Actually, he's speed-reading every situation.
What distinguishes Motss the archetypal mogul from Brean the ultimate insider is that Motss wants to leave a legacy: He still believes in history, even if only in the history of motion pictures. Unlike Brean, he hates his anonymity. After all his years in Tinseltown, he's still annoyed that the Academy doesn't give a prize for best producer (simply accepting the Oscar for best picture, as producers traditionally do, wouldn't be enough for Motss), and he's outraged that nobody knows what a producer does. He's not solely an image-maker -- he's a showman. Hoffman's acting here may outdo his peak work in Tootsie. He takes a leap of sympathetic imagination with an unsympathetic character, imbuing him with egotism and a Chunnel-scale tunnel vision that are simultaneously appalling and grandly touching. Nothing in the universe can compare to the travails he suffered while making movies, like having had to finish a new version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse after three of the horsemen die.
